CBS was slow to greenlight a revival of The Twilight Zone, turning down proposals from the original production team of Rod Serling and Buck Houghton, and later from filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola.

CBS program chief Harvey Shepard justified reviving the series in 1985 by pointing to the success of Steven Spielberg films like E.T. and Poltergeist, which dealt with similar supernatural themes.

The new theme music was composed and performed by the Grateful Dead with Merl Saunders, incorporating elements of Marius Constant's classic Twilight Zone theme, and the band also provided incidental music for several episodes.

The Grateful Dead composed and recorded the title music during a late-night studio session after animator Gary Gutierrez completed the ghostly title sequence footage, which he created by projecting Rod Serling's image onto nitrogen.

Since Rod Serling had died in 1975, narration for the revival was instead provided by Charles Aidman, who had himself starred in two episodes of the original 1959–64 series.

Unlike the original series, which had on-screen host Rod Serling, neither narrator Charles Aidman nor his season-3 replacement Robin Ward ever appeared on-screen, though Serling's image briefly appears in the revival's opening credits.

CBS's unexpected decision to schedule the show at 8 PM 'Family Viewing Hour' instead of the originally planned 10 PM slot was seen by executive producer Philip Deguere as inappropriate given the mature content of early episodes, and ratings dropped sharply after the violent episode 'Nightcrawlers' aired.

Harlan Ellison's planned directorial debut, an adaptation of Donald E. Westlake's story 'Nackles' meant to be the show's Christmas special, was halted mid-production after being rejected by CBS's Program Practices department, costing the production between $150,000 and $300,000 and losing Ellison as a creative consultant.

The episode 'Paladin of the Lost Hour,' written by Harlan Ellison, won the 1987 Writers Guild of America Award for Anthology Episode/Single Program.

The series was the first television drama to be shot on 35mm film but edited entirely on videotape, meaning no original film negatives exist for later episodes, only aging one-inch master tapes used for the DVD releases.